• There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits of any kind do not exist. The creatures with which the Greek and Roman imagination populated the world—Fates, harpies, daemons, genii, nymphs, satyrs, dryads, celestial messengers, and the spirits of the dead—are entirely unreal. Forget them.
• The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures. All the other claims—the service of the state, the glorification of the gods or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice—are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. The militarism and the taste for violent sports that characterized his own culture seemed to Lucretius in the deepest sense perverse and unnatural. Man’s natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more.
Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: “Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blushing crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment.” (2.34–36) But, as it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one’s community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitiveness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engaged in them at the risk of shipwreck.
The goal, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated and famously disturbing passage, must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safety:
It is comforting,11 when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person: not that anyone’s distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. (2:1–13)
• The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account—and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens—is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.
It is perfectly reasonable to seek to avoid pain: such avoidance is one of the pillars of his whole ethical system. But how is it possible to keep this natural aversion from turning into panic, panic that only leads to the triumph of suffering? And, more generally, why are humans so unhappy?
The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy of infinite pleasure helps to account for their proneness to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.
Once again it is perfectly reasonable to seek sexual pleasure: that is, after all, one of the body’s natural joys. The mistake, Lucretius thought, was to confound this joy with a delusion, the frenzied craving to possess—at once to penetrate and to consume—what is in reality a dream. Of course, the absent lover is always only a mental image and in this sense akin to a dream. But Lucretius observed in passages of remarkable frankness that in the very act of sexual consummation lovers remain in the grip of confused longings that they cannot fulfill:
Even in the hour of possession the passion of the lovers fluctuates and wanders in uncertainty: they cannot decide what to enjoy first with their eyes and hands. They tightly squeeze the object of their desire and cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another’s lips and crushing mouth against mouth. (4.1076–81)
The point of this passage—part of what W. B. Yeats called “the finest description12 of sexual intercourse ever written”—is not to urge a more decorous, tepid form of lovemaking. It is to take note of the element of unsated appetite13 that haunts even the fulfillment of desire. The insatiability of sexual appetite is, in Lucretius’ view, one of Venus’ cunning strategies; it helps to account for the fact that, after brief interludes, the same acts of love are performed again and again. And he understood too that these repeated acts are deeply pleasurable. But he remained troubled by the ruse, by the emotional suffering that comes in its wake, by the arousal of aggressive impulses, and, above all, by the sense that even the moment of ecstasy leaves something to be desired. In 1685, the great poet John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius’ remarkable vision:
… when the youthful pair14 more closely join,
When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine;
Just in the raging foam of full desire,
When both press on, both murmur, both expire,
They grip, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart,
As each would force their way to th’others heart.
In vain; they only cruise about the coast.
For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost,
As sure they strive to be, when both engage
In that tumultuous momentary rage.
So tangled in the nets of love they lie,
Till man dissolves in that excess of joy.
(4.1105–14)
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies—all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.
It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they fear the gods or because they nobly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation—all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living—must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.
It might seem at first that this comprehension would inevitably bring with it a sense of cold emptiness, as if the universe had been robbed of its magic. But being liberated from harmful illusions is
not the same as disillusionment. The origin of philosophy, it was often said in the ancient world, was wonder: surprise and bafflement led to a desire to know, and knowledge in turn laid the wonder to rest. But in Lucretius’ account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder.
On the Nature of Things is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a great poem. Inevitably, compiling a list of propositions, as I have done, obscures Lucretius’ astonishing poetic power, a power he himself downplayed when he compared his verses to honey smeared around the lip of a cup containing medicine that a sick man might otherwise refuse to drink. The downplaying is not altogether surprising: his philosophical master and guide, Epicurus, was suspicious of eloquence and thought that the truth should be uttered in plain, unadorned prose.
But the poetic greatness of Lucretius’ work is not incidental to his visionary project, his attempt to wrest the truth away from illusion-mongerers. Why should the tellers of fables, he thought, possess a monopoly on the means that humans have invented to express the pleasure and beauty of the world? Without those means, the world we inhabit runs the risk of seeming inhospitable, and for their comfort people will prefer to embrace fantasies, even if those fantasies are destructive. With the aid of poetry, however, the actual nature of things—an infinite number of indestructible particles swerving into one another, hooking together, coming to life, coming apart, reproducing, dying, recreating themselves, forming an astonishing, constantly changing universe—can be depicted in its true splendor.
Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.
Hence it is that, as a poet, a maker of metaphors, Lucretius could do something very strange, something that appears to violate his conviction that the gods are deaf to human petitions. On the Nature of Things opens with a prayer to Venus. Once again Dryden probably best renders in English the spirit of Lucretius’ ardor:
Delight of humankind15 and gods above,
Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love,
Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,
And breeds whate’er is born beneath the rolling skies;
For every kind, by thy prolific might,
Springs and beholds the regions of the light:
Thee, Goddess, thee, the clouds and tempests fear,
And at thy pleasing presence disappear;
For thee the land in fragrant flowers is dressed,
For thee the ocean smiles and smooths her wavy breast,
And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blessed.
(1.1–9)
The hymn pours forth, full of wonder and gratitude, glowing with light. It is as if the ecstatic poet actually beheld the goddess of love, the sky clearing at her radiant presence, the awakening earth showering her with flowers. She is the embodiment of desire, and her return, on the fresh gusts of the west wind, fills all living things with pleasure and passionate sexual longing:
For when the rising spring adorns the mead,
And a new scene of nature stands displayed,
When teeming buds and cheerful greens appear,
And western gales unlock the lazy year,
The joyous birds thy welcome first express
Whose native songs thy genial fire confess.
Then savage beasts bound o’er their slighted food,
Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.
All nature is thy gift: earth, air, and sea;
Of all that breathes, the various progeny,
Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.
O’er barren mountains, o’er the flowery plain,
The leafy forest, and the liquid main
Extends thy uncontrolled and boundless reign.
Through all the living regions dost thou move
And scatterest, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love.
(1.9–20)
We do not know how the German monks who copied the Latin verses and kept them from destruction responded, nor do we know what Poggio Bracciolini, who must at least have glanced at them as he salvaged the poem from oblivion, thought they meant. Certainly almost every one of the poem’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy. But the poetry was compellingly, seductively beautiful. And we can see with hallucinatory vividness what at least one Italian, later in the fifteenth century, made of them: we have only to look at Botticelli’s great painting of Venus, ravishingly beautiful, emerging from the restless matter of the sea.
CHAPTER NINE
THE RETURN
“LUCRETIUS HAS NOT yet come back to me,” Poggio wrote to his Venetian friend, the patrician humanist Francesco Barbaro, “although he has been copied.” Evidently, then, Poggio had not been allowed to borrow the ancient manuscript (which he characteristically referred to as if it were the poet himself) and take it back to Constance with him. The monks must have been too wary for that and forced him instead to find someone to make a copy. He did not expect this scribe to deliver the result, important as it was, in person: “The place is rather far away1 and not many people come from there,” Poggio wrote, “and so I shall wait until some people turn up who will bring him.” How long would he be willing to wait? “If no one comes,” he assured his friend, “I shall not put public duties ahead of private needs.” A very strange remark, for what is public here and what is private? Poggio was, perhaps, telling Barbaro not to worry: official duties in Constance (whatever they might be) would not stand in the way of getting his hands on Lucretius.
When the manuscript2 of On the Nature of Things finally did reach him, Poggio evidently sent it off at once to Niccolò Niccoli, in Florence. Either because the scribe’s copy was crudely made or simply because he wanted a version for himself, Poggio’s friend undertook to transcribe it. This transcription in Niccoli’s elegant hand, together with the copy made by the German scribe, spawned dozens of further manuscript copies—more than fifty are known to survive—and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius. Poggio’s discovery thus served as the crucial conduit through which the ancient poem, dormant for a thousand years, reentered circulation in the world. In the cool gray and white Laurentian library that Michelangelo designed for the Medici, Niccoli’s copy of the scribe’s copy of the ninth-century copy of Lucretius’ poem—Codex Laurentianus 35.30—is preserved. One of the key sources of modernity, it is a modest book, bound in fading, tattered red leather inlaid with metal, a chain attached to the bottom of the back cover. There is little to distinguish it physically from many other manuscripts in the collection, apart from the fact that a reader is given latex gloves to wear when it is delivered to the desk.
The copy that the scribe made and that Poggio sent from Constance to Florence is lost. Presumably, after completing his transcription, Niccoli sent it back to Poggio, who does not seem to have copied it in his own exquisite hand. Perhaps, confident in Niccoli’s skills, Poggio or his heirs deemed the scribe’s copy not worth preserving and in the end simply threw it away. Lost too is the manuscript that the scribe had copied and that presumably remained in the monastic library. Did it burn up in a fire? Was the ink carefully scraped off in order to make room for some other text? Did it finally molder away from neglect, the victim of damp and rot? Or di
d a pious reader actually take in its subversive implications and choose to destroy it? No remnants of it have been discovered. Two ninth-century manuscripts of On the Nature of Things, unknown to Poggio or any of his humanist contemporaries, did manage to make it through the almost impenetrable barrier of time. These manuscripts, named after their formats the Oblongus and the Quadratus, were cataloged in the collection of a great seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and collector, Isaac Voss, and have been in the Leiden University Library since 1689. Fragments of a third ninth-century manuscript, containing about 45 percent of Lucretius’ poem, also turned out to survive and are now housed in collections in Copenhagen and Vienna. But by the time these manuscripts surfaced, Lucretius’ poem, thanks to Poggio’s discovery, had already long been helping to unsettle and transform the world.
It is possible that Poggio sent his copy of the poem to Niccoli without having done more than look at it briefly. He had much to occupy his mind. Baldassare Cossa had been stripped of the papacy and was languishing in prison. The second claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Angelo Correr, who had been forced to resign his title of Gregory XII, died in October 1417. The third claimant, Pedro de Luna, barricaded first in the fortress of Perpignan and then on the inaccessible rock of Peñiscola on the sea coast near Valencia, still tenaciously called himself Benedict XIII, but it was clear to Poggio and almost everyone else that Papa Luna’s claim could not be taken seriously. The papal throne was vacant, and the council—which, like the current European Community, was riven with tensions among the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish delegations—squabbled over the conditions that would have to be met before proceeding to elect a new pope.